If you are an ecommerce company, then Apple’s path over the last year or so should be making you eager with anticipation. Unlike other technology companies, Apple rarely lays out their vision for their products in advance. Instead they prefer to launch and refine the underlying hardware technologies before launching the actual product or service. Metal and Apple Pay are but couple of the recent items on this checklist.
Last year’s 3D touch promises to evolve into a form where an online customer will be able to actually touch and feel what you are selling online. This will eliminate one more reason for customers to visit physical stores and get a feel of the items they’re buying.
This year’s dual camera system will in parallel will surely drive the effort towards enhancing computer vision. MTailor, which uses your phone camera to take measurements for shirts is but one of the baby steps towards this, and it has been in market for a couple of years already.
I’m sure Amazon is also aware of this, and they’d be among the first to commoditize these technologies on their Fire tablets and play a key role overall once the technology hits mainstream. They definitely missed a big opportunity with the Fire phone that had some interesting sensors, but not the vision (or maybe execution) to use them to the fullest.
Of course it is not just Apple working on the technologies involved, but given their vertical integration and focus, they are easily the only company that has the clout to push the market towards the standardization of the technologies involved (not necessarily interoperability with other platforms though). Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and Valve/Steam) have quite a lot of stuff going on in the AR/VR space, but given their limited influence on the hardware side of things, adoption will be slower than they’d like.
E-Commerce is but the tip of the iceberg of all that’s possible once computer vision and AR take off. Here’s to the next decade of new developments.
AB's Reflections 